We tend to think of Shakespeare as a magus, so to see him as we do in Edward Bond’s Bingo — an impotent and sleepless old man, fiftyish but looking more — is unsettling. That’s exactly what Bond wants: the subtitle, Scenes of Money and Death, establishes that this is a portrait of a mortal, capitalist man, not an immortal poetic master.

Patrick Stewart played the lead in Bingo in 1977, and here he has been granted his longstanding wish to reprise the role. It requires him to look stonily impassive while pangs of hunger snip at the guts of those around him.

Social change is afoot: in Stratford, the local grandee William Combe (Jason Watkins) is keen to fence in the public land for his private use. Shakespeare knows he should oppose this. But he’s anxious to secure his own rights and is therefore torn between financial and moral impulses.
Stewart expertly suggests this tension. His face is often blank, and he seems cold. Yet in a scrupulously understated style he conveys the turmoil within. In Robert Innes Hopkins’s handsome design, Shakespeare’s garden at Stratford is a verdant hutch, which he patrols like a moon-gazing white rabbit. 

In the best of the play’s six scenes Shakespeare is at an inn with his fellow playwright Ben Jonson. The two are drunk, and Jonson (an enjoyably sottish Richard McCabe) gooses him: “Your recent stuff has been pretty peculiar. What was The Winter’s Tale about? I ask to be polite.”
Bond’s vision of Shakespeare is meant as a corrective to what he might call Bourgeois Bardolatry. He presents him as a petty King Lear of the suburbs — certainly not heroic, and not even imaginative or especially articulate, but sensitive about his status and his legacy. 

Stewart’s performance has a spartan grandeur, and in supporting roles there is strong work from John McEnery, Alex Price and Catherine Cusack. 
The revival feels timely, not only because Shakespearean biography has become a cottage industry but also because the play’s title suggests that society is an arbitrary numbers game. Yet Bond’s fierce moral vision has the unhappy effect of recasting the national poet as an enemy of the people.

It’s an iconoclastic move that doesn’t really satisfy, and Angus Jackson’s elegant production cannot mask the fact that the text, while it contains moments of visionary brilliance, is structurally loose and lacks momentum. 
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